In the long evolution of human beings, all types of work that are intense and harmful to human health will eventually be replaced by high-tech equipment. Spraying is such an example of replacing human labor with robots. The global spraying robot market has grown from $2 billion to $6 billion, and this trend is just the beginning, and the future prospects are still very broad. According to reports, although China's spraying robot started late, it has developed rapidly. As of 2017, the market size of spraying robots in China has approached 8 billion yuan, and the market size is expected to exceed 14 billion by 2020.

As a robot that can automatically complete surface spraying operations, the spraying robot has the advantages of high efficiency, accuracy, stability and energy saving. In the development process of spraying robots, developed countries such as Europe, America and Japan are far ahead in this field and have always occupied a dominant position.

The advantages

of spraying robots are high in production efficiency, suitable for manual work and industrial automation production, and have a wide range of applications, mainly in hardware, plastics, furniture, military industry, ships and other fields, which is the most commonly used coating method today; Spraying operations require a dust-free workshop from one million to one hundred levels, and the spraying equipment includes spray guns, spray booths, paint supply rooms, curing ovens/drying furnaces, spraying workpiece conveying equipment, defogging and waste water, waste gas treatment equipment, etc.

The main problem in spraying is the highly dispersed paint mist and volatile solvents, which not only pollute the environment, are not conducive to human health, but also waste paint and cause economic losses. Therefore, spraying robots came into being.

Spraying robots, also known as spray painting robots, are industrial robots that can automatically spray paint or spray other paints. The spraying robot has four advantages, one of which is flexibility. The scope of work is large; the second is to improve the quality of spraying and the use of materials; Third, it is easy to operate and maintain, and can be programmed offline, which greatly shortens the on-site commissioning time; Fourth, the equipment utilization rate is high, and the utilization rate can reach 90%-95%.

The extensive use of spraying robots greatly liberates the labor force working in dangerous environments, greatly improves the production efficiency of automobile manufacturing enterprises, and brings stable spraying quality, reduces the repair rate of finished products, and improves the utilization rate of paint, reduces the emission of waste paint and waste solvents, and helps to build an environmentally friendly green factory.

Spraying robot composition
The
spraying robot is mainly composed of the robot body, the computer and the corresponding control system. The more advanced spraying robot wrist adopts a flexible wrist, which can be bent in all directions and rotated, and its action is similar to that of a human wrist, which can easily reach into the inside of the workpiece through a smaller hole and spray its inner surface.

At present, the spraying robots supplied in the international market can be roughly divided into the following categories: according to whether they have the function of moving horizontally along the running direction of the body conveyor, they are divided into rail-mounted and fixed-mounted robots; According to the different installation positions, it is divided into floor-mounted and cantilever robots. Floor-standing robots have the advantage of being easy to maintain and clean. Orbital robots have the advantage of a relatively large working range. The cantilever robot can reduce the width of the spray booth to reduce energy consumption.

The spraying robot is generally composed of 8 parts, the main body of the robot (that is, the base, the arm, the wrist and the terminal actuator, which is a series of mechanical connections with a rotary connection and a 6-axis or 7-axis linkage of AC servo motor, using a gear train and an RV-type reducer), a robot controller (a device that sends command signals to the drive system and actuator according to the input program and controls the movement trajectory of a single robot equipment), System operation console (the main function is to integrate the hardware of the entire spray booth to realize the system automation function, including all the hardware related to the management of spraying robot activities and the related hardware integrated into each spray booth), process control cabinet (the relative safety interface between the electrical signal and the potential volatile paints and solvents, converting the electrical signal into a pneumatic signal), the vehicle detection system (according to the difference between different production sites and the models produced, different positions are set as detection positions through PLC programs, And adjust the installation position of the photoelectric switch), set up a safe and isolated production area (usually a pair of safety gratings can be installed at the entrance and exit of the automatic spraying area of the robot respectively to prevent personal injuries and accidents that damage the equipment), body linear tracking system (the robot used in the automatic spraying line of the whole vehicle, in order to improve the production beat, the body has been following the conveyor chain in the process of spraying operation according to the set speed, and will not be fixed from the conveyor chain somewhere for the robot spraying operation), Power distribution cabinet (power distribution and distribution source).

Promising development of

the spraying market Due to the limitation of parameters such as the degree of freedom of each joint and the length of the arm, different coating robots have different effective dimensions that can be touched for spraying. In the automotive coating process, the application of spraying robots is becoming more and more extensive, and its significant advantage is that it can produce a variety of models on the same production line at the same time, which improves the degree of automation and production efficiency of coating. The quality of coating robots on the market is different, and choosing high-quality coating robots can better carry out painting work.

For automakers, high-precision robotics is not what they need, but rather a major problem for the future production operation of the manufacturing plant. For example, the training of maintenance personnel, the support of process renewal, and the inventory of spare parts. Therefore, the equipment that is concise but not simple, easy to learn and master, stable and effective, and has relatively low operation and maintenance costs is what users need. In addition, the quality of body spraying largely depends on the paint characteristics, so how to reasonably design the spraying trajectory according to different paint characteristics and body shapes to achieve better spraying quality is also a topic worth studying.